Healthcare

Here's how Obamacare covered Americans with pre-existing conditions. What happens next?

The Guardian: One of the most popular parts of the Affordable Care Act guarantees health insurance for people with “pre-existing conditions” – medical problems such as HIV, Alzheimer’s disease, and epilepsy. Before the law took full effect in 2014, people with these conditions were routinely denied coverage. Back then, insurers in 45 states and the District of Columbia could reject individual applicants — those who didn’t receive insurance through an employer or the government — on the basis of health; five states didn’t allow so-called “medical underwriting”. Insurers’ rationale for rejecting people with pre-existing conditions was straightforward: sick people are more expensive to cover than the healthy and young. "Someone with cancer is going to make, let's say, a hundred times the health insurance claims of someone in good health in a year," said Karen Pollitz, a senior fellow studying health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation. A study Pollitz authored last year found that, in 2011, the sickest 10% of Americans accounted for almost two-thirds of health spending in the population. In all, at least 30 pre-existing conditions would automatically disqualify people from major health insurance plans before the Affordable Care Act, according to another recent study by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Even when applicants had less severe conditions, such as high cholesterol, insurers often sought to limit costs by charging higher premiums, increasing deductibles or modifying benefits.

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